Foreword

Foreword

Monday 14 January 2008 18.49 EST
First published on Monday 14 January 2008 18.49 EST

Love, for the ancients, was the force that made happen everything that did happen. Every movement was prompted by desire. Nowadays when an apple falls to earth we call the force that sent it gravity, without registering the truth that gravity is just another name for attraction. The god of love is the oldest of the gods because he is the force without which the gods could not have come into being. The most vivid way to enact the elemental pull that makes earth take shape out of exploding gases is to dramatise it as sexual love between people, which generates life and defies death.

The power of love cannot be resisted. Even now we say that "love will find a way" and that "love laughs at locksmiths". In walling up his daughter, Acrisius defies the god of love, which is just as hopeless as trying to turn back the tide. Renaissance painters depicting the shower of gold pouring into Danaë's lap often show us the mischievous boy-god Eros pulling back the sheet so that the golden flood penetrates deep between Danaë's thighs. Danaë, like the earth itself, is impregnated by the power of rain - Zeus being the god of thunder - and she and her son are cast on the bosom of the sea to which all rain must tend, tugged by gravity. And from the sea she arises like the sea-born goddess of love herself.

Love can be disgusting, cruel and degrading, but even from the most humiliating liaisons, wonderful creatures may be born. Poseidon, the god of the sea, has succumbed to a terrible infatuation with the dread Medusa. When Zeus's love child Perseus strikes off her death-dealing head, the winged horse Pegasus, figure of sublime imagination, springs from the wound. Just so is poetry born from human mire and blood.

The transforming power that drives all change, that turns eggs into infants, and stinking volcanoes into fertile islands, comes to a dead halt in Narcissus. There are many ways of interpreting the Narcissus story, some more useful than others. In the oldest version, which is to be found on one of the papyri found at Oxyrynchus and in a later version by Pausanias, Narcissus sent one of his male suitors a sword, which he used to kill himself on the doorstep of Narcissus's house. Narcissus is then punished not by Eros, but by Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance, who causes him to fall hopelessly in love with his own reflection, which he does not recognise, or in another version, with his twin sister. In the version you will read here, Narcissus has dared to deny the power of Eros, who takes revenge on him by firing two arrows, one into the breast of Echo and the other into Narcissus's heart.

In Ovid's version, 16-year-old Narcissus is simply unresponsive to the desire of others to enjoy his young body. In this he could be right or wrong. To be desired is not to experience desire. Immature people do not have a duty to respond to the sexual advances of other people, regardless of what the randy boy-god might decree. Ovid's Echo has been silenced by Juno (the Roman equivalent of the Greek Hera) because she intervened when Juno was trying to catch her husband out in adulterous affairs with her sister nymphs, holding her in conversation long enough for Jupiter (the Roman Zeus) to get away. Echo is punished for fostering sexual licence, Narcissus for refusing to allow it. The connection between the two myths, as far as we can tell, was first made by Ovid.

The Greek myths are central to European literature mainly because of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Latin versions which remained accessible through the long centuries when the study of Greek was neglected in western Europe. When Freud talks of narcissism he is using the Ovidian concept of a natural infatuation of youth with itself. The archaic version of the Narcissus story does not carry the same weight of suggestion about adolescent sexuality as Ovid's account. In the version you will read here, Narcissus is punished for impiety by the direct intervention of Eros. The omnipotence of love is compressed to a single mythic action, phallic enough in itself, of shooting an arrow.

In Ovid's version Narcissus simply wastes away; in other versions of the story he kills himself, either by stabbing himself or throwing himself into the pool. Ovid's version resembles more closely what we know about adolescence. One way of explaining anorexia is to see it as a pathological elaboration of narcissism and a deliberate rejection of sexual maturity. Freud saw masturbation as the sexual expression of narcissism; that excessive masturbation will make you waste away is, of course, a myth.